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Sunday, January 31, 2016

Tories have been lobbying the EU to remove the tax haven,
Bermuda, through which Google funnels billions of pounds of profits from an
official blacklist. Treasury ministers have told the European commission that
they are “strongly opposed” to proposed sanctions against Bermuda, a favoured
shelter for Google’s profits. Tory MEPs were instructed on six different
occasions last year to vote against proposals that would clamp down on
multinationals that engage in aggressive tax avoidance.

Tory MEPs opposed proposals designed to squeeze more money
out of big companies, including a vote last month on imposing sanctions on
companies using tax havens.

In November, Tory MEPs also voted against mandatory
country-by-country reporting on tax receipts and the automatic exchange of
information on tax rulings across borders.

In October they opposed the automatic cross-border exchange
of information relating to companies’ tax planning within the EU.

And Tory MEPs voted in July against giving assistance to tax
administrations in developing countries to tackle tax evasion.

In March and January, Conservative and Ukip MEPs voted
against a report calling for action to tackle tax avoidance, tax evasion and
aggressive tax planning and a motion calling for the commission to commit to
clamping down on tax fraud through legislation.

Google has 10 employees lobbying in Brussels, where it spent
£2.7m on promoting the goals of the company in 2014. The internet giant also
held 67 meetings with members of the European commission last year

Google is expected to announce on Monday that it has amassed
£30bn of profits from non-US sales in Bermuda, where companies are not liable
to pay corporation tax. The UK is Google’s largest non-US market, accounting
for 11% of its global revenues, according to documents.

There are 211,275 ultra-high net worth individuals (UHNWIs),
with a combined net worth of $30 trillion – or 13% of the world’s total wealth.
The 62 wealthiest individuals in the group, have a combined net worth of $1.72
trillion (under 0.8% of global wealth).

By 2019, these numbers will increase to more than 250,000
individuals with a combined net worth of $40 trillion.

The average billionaire has a net worth of $3.13 billion,
while the average UHNWI has an average net worth of $212 million.

The average billionaire owns 4 properties, valued at an
average of $23.5 million each. Real estate makes up 3% of billionaires’ net
worth. UHNWIs own 2.7 properties on average, making up 8% of their net worth.

30% of UHNWIs have at least one residential property in
another country.

The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission ranked
every English council for disadvantaged children's prospects. The commission
said some of the richest areas failed poor children the most.

Not one pupil eligible for free school meals in
Cambridgeshire got into an Oxbridge university in 2014, and no Oxfordshire
pupil managed it in 2013. Children from poor families in Oxford and Cambridge
have less chance of good exam grades than those in London's most deprived
areas, says a report.

Despite being home to two of the world's best universities,
Oxford and Cambridge "do quite badly" by children from disadvantaged
homes, says the commission.

It found that of children eligible for free school meals in
the two cities:

Fewer than four in 10 achieve a good level of development by
age five

Only a quarter get five good GCSEs, including English and
maths

More than one in five are not in education, employment or
training a year after GCSEs

Relatively few go to university (15% in Cambridge and 14% in
Oxford)

In Oxford only 4% go to a selective university and in
Cambridge only 2%

By contrast, in London's Tower Hamlets, which has the
highest rate of child poverty in England:

More than half of children on free school meals achieve a
good level of development by five

More than half get five good GCSEs including English and
maths

Only 11% are not in education, employment or training a year
after GCSEs

How they love to single out benefit fraud but one in three aged
Londoners are missing out on Pension Credit worth an average of £23 a week, or
£1,200 a year. £470 million goes unclaimed across London.

One in six older Londoners are estimated to be living in poverty.
The Greater London Authority estimates that around 200,000 older Londoners are
living in poverty. Older people in London are much more likely to be living in
material deprivation than anywhere else in the country.Nearly three times the
proportion of pensioners living in inner London are unable to afford basics
like having a warm winter coat, being able to keep their home damp free and
having a regular haircut.

For 7.45 million construction workers in America -
one-fourth of them foreign born - going to work as a bricklayer, carpenter,
electrician, framer, mason, painter, plumber, or drywall or tile installer
means facing acute dangers within their daily work. Attorney Robert Mongeluzzi
of the Philadelphia firm of Saltz, Mongeluzzi, Barrett and Bendesky has
represented victims of construction negligence for 30 years. "The root
cause of injury and death is the lack of construction oversight," he said.
"When builders incur debt, the faster they do the construction, the more
profit they make. Given the profit motive, shortcuts are sometimes taken."

US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that fatal injuries on
construction sites increased by 5 percent in 2014, to 874. In addition,
hundreds of thousands of workers are injured on the job, filing an incredible 1
million workers' compensation claims a year for both temporary conditions -
such as broken bones and sprains - and permanent injuries, including paralysis
and loss of limbs.

Scott Allen, director for public affairs at the US
Department of Labor's Midwest office, concedes that budget shortfalls have kept
OSHA from being as vigilant as it would like to be. Still, he says, it's not
for lack of commitment. "We know what we're dealing with and don't even
use the word 'accidents' for death and injury on construction sites," he
said. "We call them incidents because almost every one of them could have
been prevented if the employer had done the right thing for his or her
workers."

Charlene Obernauer, executive director of the New York
Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH), agrees. "Real
estate is the domestic product in New York City," she said. "In other
places, they have corn or coal, but in New York City it's about the race to
build the biggest, most profitable buildings." That said, Obernauer points
out that construction workers and their advocates face additional obstacles.
OSHA - the federal agency responsible for protecting worker health and safety -
is severely understaffed, she told Truthout. In the Empire State alone, she
said, "It would take the 113 inspectors employed by the agency 107 years
to inspect each workplace one time." Nationwide, fewer than 3,000
inspectors - an average of 60 per state - are charged with monitoring 8 million
work sites. It's a small wonder that safety violations often fall through the
cracks.

Allen also acknowledges that OSHA does not have enough staff
to ensure that every construction site is in compliance with prevailing health
and safety codes. "OSHA looks at the stats for the industry overall,"
he said, "and if we see a spike, say, in falls or electrocutions on a
national or local level, we'll put an emphasis on that industry or place. We
also go out to inspect if we get complaints about problems at a particular site
and will issue a citation if violations are found."

If the employer shows a direct disregard for OSHA standards,
or is a repeat offender, the fine amount can be increased to $70,000 for each
violation and the business can be placed in the Severe Violator Enforcement
Program (SVEP). Once they're put in SVEP, their workplaces will be inspected
more regularly, and with more vigilance, since they have a track record of not
protecting their workers. As of July 2014, 257 construction firms were on
OSHA's SVEP watch list, a 23 percent increase over 2013.

Texas leads the United States in on-site construction
deaths; New York, however, follows close behind. One of every 13 people
employed in Texas works in construction. A 2013 report compiled by the Workers
Defense Project revealed that 60 percent of the state's largely Latino
construction workforce has never received health and safety training; 78
percent have no health insurance; 71 percent receive no benefits from their
employer; and 20 percent have had to seek medical attention at least once for a
serious workplace injury. Almost half, 41 percent, had experienced payroll
fraud, from outright wage theft to lack of overtime pay. Their average earnings
came to a paltry $12.24 per hour. And the situation has not improved in the
three years since the report was released.

Construction accounts for 4 percent of jobs in New York
State, it accounts for 20 percent of workplace fatalities. Charlene Obernauer explained
"There is a huge correlation between non-union jobs and fatalities. Eighty
percent of the deaths occurred on non-union sites, among workers employed by
small non-union companies with only a few employees. On union sites, there is
rigorous training. Just to get into the union a worker needs to complete a
nine-month apprenticeship program. When you compare union to non-union
workplaces, you see that workers on small sites typically lack an OSHA 10 card,
a document that is needed to work on a building with 10 or more stories."

Smaller firms are also more likely to rely on day laborers.
Gonzalo Mercado, executive director of the Staten Island Community Job Center,
estimates that several thousand people - most of them young men from Ecuador
and Mexico - go to one of the 35 city street corners known to be day laborer
pickup sites in hopes of finding employment. Pay, he says, averages $120 a day
but training is rare and safety precautions are virtually unheard of. Injuries,
he says, are common.

"Despite substantial changes since the end of the
enforcement of Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights, ideology ensuring the
domination of one group over another continues to negatively impact the civil,
political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights of African
Americans today," said human rights expert and working group head Mireille
Fanon Mendes France. "The persistent gap in almost all the human development
indicators, such as life expectancy, income and wealth, level of education,
housing, employment and labour, and even food security, among African Americans
and the rest of the US population, reflects the level of structural
discrimination that creates de facto barriers for people of African descent to
fully exercise their human rights," Mendes France's continues.

Among the numerous problems noted in the findings is
"the alarming levels of police brutality and excessive use of lethal force
by law enforcement officials committed with impunity," citing the killings
of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, and
Laquan McDonald, as well as others.

"Contemporary police killings and the trauma it creates
are reminiscent of the racial terror lynching of the past. Impunity for state
violence has resulted in the current human rights crisis and must be addressed
as a matter of urgency," the statement reads.

The group slams "the criminalization of poverty which
disproportionately affects African Americans," and calls out cities like
Ferguson, Mo. where jails are often "debtors' prisons."

The report goes on to note discriminatory voter ID laws;
states' rejection of Medicaid expansion, which serves as just one way in which
African Americans' realization of the right to health is thwarted; the
existence of "food deserts" in many African American communities;
schools' insufficient covering of the period of enslavement and the "root
causes of racial inequality and injustice... [thereby] contribut[ing] to the
structural invisibility of African-Americans"; the housing crisis, high
rates of homelessness and gentrification; the high unemployment rate of African
Americans; and the environmental justice denied African Americans by highly
polluting industries often disproportionately being placed in their
communities.

The group reiterates their calls from 2010 after their last
visit to the country, including the need to establish a national human rights
commission, for Congress to swiftly pass pending criminal justice reform bills
including the End Racial Profiling Act, and the need for a national ban on the
death penalty. It also states:

“There is a profound need to acknowledge that the
transatlantic slave trade was a crime against humanity and among the major
sources and manifestations of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and
related intolerance and that Africans and people of African descent were
victims of these acts and continue to be victims of their consequences. Past
injustices and crimes against African Americans need to be addressed with
reparatory justice.”

As the American author William Faulkner wrote, "The past is not dead. It
isn't even past".

With the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour
Party, some on the Left are once again suggesting “socialists” should join the
Labour Party. The Socialist Party will disappoint them becoause we will have no
truck with this supposed workers organization. And it is a matter of principle,
not opportunism or dogmatic sectarianism that we oppose the Labour Party. This
debate from our earlier years is worth re-publishing as a statement of our
position.

"SHOULD SOCIALISTS AFFILIATE WITH THE LABOUR PARTY?" "

From the September 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

A debate upon the above subject was held at the King and
Queen Assembly Rooms at Brighton on 25th July.

A local celebrity, Mr. Winchester, took the chair, and
introduced what he called “the two gladiators” to the audience. Mr. J. Ingham
(I.L.P.) took the affirmative, and Mr. J. Fitzgerald (S.P.G.B.) the negative.

In opening the debate MR.
INGHAM said the subject was not what was Socialism, nor even whether the
legislation supported by the Labour Party leads to Socialism, but whether
Socialists should affiliate with that party with all its shortcomings.

For the sake of clearness, the speaker went on to say, it
would be as well to state that Socialism implied three changes—economic change,
political change, and mental change. That was the theory or aspiration of
Socialism. In practice it meant the revolt of the masses; but this revolt must
have power behind it, and this power was both economic and political.

The power behind the vote was the power of nomination, which
the working class have only had in late years.

As far as the capitalist class were concerned the S.P.G.B.
or I.L.P. or B.S.P. didn't matter much, and the only menace to the rulers in
society today were the Labour Party. They were demanding the right to manage
affairs for themselves. It might be true that they were not doing this in the
best way from the standpoint of the Socialist, and he aid not uphold the part
played by the Labour Party in the House of Commons, but they represented the
social consciousness of the the unions, who laid down the policy of the party.

The Labour Party consisted of the I.L P. and the Fabians—who
formed the intellectual Socialist wing—and the mass of the organised workers.
In all historic movements the intellectuality followed, it did not lead, the
movement.

The question the Socialist had to face was, should he help
the movement of the organised workers—the Labour Party—by being inside, or
should he play the part of the so-called intellectual and stand outside on a
mountain criticising and carping at their actions. Despite all their
shilly-shallying and support of the Government the Socialist should be inside,
doing his best to help it and to help it to take the right road.

The Revolution would be carried out by the workers becoming
class-conscious and taking hold of political power to overthrow their rulers.
In this connection he would point out that there had never been a traitor in
the House of Commons. Every member there represented the views of those who
sent him there. No member of the Labour Party could represent others than those
who sent him to Parliament.

Intellectual Socialists should be inside of the Labour
Party, guiding it by getting hold of the reins for that purpose. (Bell rang.)

MR. FITZGERALD
said one fault he had to find with his opponent’s definition of Socialism was
the order in which the changes were placed. Before the working class could
carry through the political change having for its object the change in the
ownership of the means of life, there would have to be a change in their
understanding of the situation and a determination to alter it. Hence the
mental change must precede the political and economic changes involved in the
establishment of Socialism.

His opponent had said that the revolt must have power behind
it. Exactly. But what power? What must it consist of? To answer the question it
would be necessary to examine the power in the hands of, and used by, the
present rulers. The working class to-day were in want and misery because they
had no access to the means of life except by permission of the master class.
How did the master class retain their possession of those things? Leaving out
the various secondary agencies, the essential force came to the front when any
big dispute occurred, as a railway strike, a miners’ or a transport strike.
Then the army and navy and the judicial machinery were used, rapidly and
ruthlessly, against the workers.

These forces received their instructions from the War
Office, Naval Office, Home Office, etc., but the officials in the departments
were appointed by the House of Commons, and this was done without any reference
to the Hones of Lords, showing the character of the Labour Party’s campaign
against that institution.

Hence the capitalists must have control of Parliament for
the purpose of using the armed forces for the preservation of their property.
To get this control they must be voted into Parliament.

The people possessing the majority of the votes were the
members of the working class. Hence the political promises, the election
red-herrings, and the buying of the “leaders” of the working class when
elections were on. The capitalists clearly saw the importance of political
power, and spent millions to obtain it.

Where did the Labour Party stand in this connection? They
acted as decoy ducks to the capitalist class. From their first formation to the
present day they had refused to lay down any principles or policy in the
interest of the wording class. The Socialist Party’s Manifesto gave numerous
instances and proofs of their treachery, but one or two cases having a
particular bearing on his opponent’s statement would be useful.

In 1906 a group of nearly 40 “Labour” leaders were returned
to Parliament with the help of the Liberal Party. So much were they really part
of the Liberal party that when, a little later, a by-election took place at
Leicester, the Labour Party dared not contest the second seat. The same thing
occurred at Newcastle, but it was left for the January 1910 general election to
completely pull the veil away. A short time previously the Labour Party had
received an immense addition to its membership and leaders by the affiliation
of the Miners’ Federation, yet after the election they had only about 43 seats.
This result by itself was a collapse of the Labour Party, but worse than this
had happened. His opponent had said “those who nominate control," and had
stated that the members of the Labour Party had nominated their
representatives. At the 1910 general election the nominations of the rank and
file were withdrawn by the score at the orders of the Executive acting on the
instructions of the Liberal Party. Again, the election had been fought by
Liberal and “Labour” Parties on the Veto of the House of Lords and the Budget.
When the election was over Mr. Asquith announced that the Veto question would
be deferred until after the Budget had been taken. A paper called the “Labour
Leader” described Mr. Asquith’s action as one of treachery to his constituents.
When the matter was first voted upon the Labour Party voted for the Government.
They therefore were equally as guilty of treachery as Mr. Asquith.

In March 1910 the Labour Party moved an amendment on the
Army Estimates over the wages of Government employees, and when it was voted
upon about 22 were absent and 15 of the remainder voted against their own
amendment to save the Government.

The fact that the Labour Party had lost every three cornered
contest—as well as several others—in the January election, showed how
completely dependent upon the Liberals they were.

While the working class accepted “leaders” they would always
be misled. It showed that they had not yet reached that stage of class
consciousness that was necessary for their emancipation. When they became
Socialists they would abolish “leaders” and “leadership,” and keep control and
power in their own hands.

Mr. INGHAM in his
second speech said it appeared to him that the philosophy of the , S.P.G.B. had
changed since the issuing of their pamphlet on “Socialism and Religion”
according to Mr. Fitzgerald’s statements. There they laid down the materialist
conception of history as their basis, while his opponent took up the idealist
position. He was beginning to believe the S.P.G.B. had no intellectuality.

The working class must be free mentally from the influence
of their rulers, but every class who had revolted had leaders. His opponent had
stated that the S.P. were going to take control of the army and navy when they
had a majority in Parliament. Did they think the capitalists would let them?
Without organised labour outside political power would be useless. Men always
had had and always would have leaders. It would not be by teaching but by
economic pressure that the change would be brought about, and the mass would
follow leaders at the period of change. Bat ae they would nominate these
leaders they would control them. TheTories controlled those they nominated. Mr.
Lloyd George was controlled by his nominators, who forced him to introduce
measures that threatened his political career.

Snowden and Macdonald occupied the position of himself (Mr.
Ingham) and the S.P.G.B, fifteen years ago, while men like Broadhurst then took
up the attitude of Macdonald & Co. to day. Despite this, Labour politics
must lead to Socialism and the future laid with the trade unions.

If the majority were with him at the Conferences the clique
would soon be turned out. So long as the working class thought a clique
represents their interests they would support them. It was because they thought
the Liberal clique thus represented them that they supported them to day.

MR. FITZGERALD said that his opponent clearly contradicted
himself, and in parts admitted the correctness of the policy of the Socialist
Party.

If the workers must be free mentally from the influence of
their rulers, obviously a mental change was the first requisite. With reference
to the point of the lack of intellectuality on the part of the S.P.G.B., what
he (Mr. Fitzgerald) had said was that the S.P. contained no “intellectuals” of
the type condemned by his opponent. To try and twist this into an admission of
"lack of intellectuality ” was both cheap and childish.

With regard to leaders, it was, perhaps, a trifle
elementary, but as his opponent had introduced the point he must deal with it.

Under any system of organisation various activities had to
be delegated to different individuals, but this delegation of function did not
necessarily mean a sheep-like following, or the placing of power in the hands
of the delegates. Thus in the Socialist Party certain members were delegated as
speakers, some as writers, others as organisers, etc. But each and all were
under the control of, and obeyed the directions of, the membership. The
position of Mr. Ingham was similar to that of Keir Hardie, who stated that
mankind was a herd who followed leaders, and that that was "the purest
form of democracy” ! That, of course, was the sort of following the clique who
run the Labour Party wanted, so that they could make their bargains with the
Liberals for posts and positions a la Shackleton, Cummings, Mitchell, and
others.

His opponent's statements on the army and navy showed how
little he understood the power of the ruling class. They controlled these
forces because they possessed the political machinery. When this machinery was
wrested from them by the working class, how could the capitalists prevent the
workers controlling those forces? He had dealt with these matters in his first
speech and his opponent had not shown a single point to be wrong.

His opponent’s next statement showed how completely he was
misled by the Anarchist rubbish re-labelled Syndicalism, that an economic
organisation can destroy capitalism. No matter what the form of organisation or
how complete its membership, such a combination of unarmed men would obviously
he powerless against the armed forces while the capitalists had political
power.

Macdonald and Snowdeu may have occupied a position fifteen
years ago similar to that of his opponent to-day, but neither then nor now did
they take up the attitude of the Socialist Party — i e., the Socialist attitude.

If his opponent agreed that he must get a majority on his
side to get his views adopted, he was admitting the correctness of the policy
of the Socialist Party, for this was their position.

MR. INGHAM in his last speech said that delegation of
function was exactly the position of the Labour Party. To take up a position of
delegate of the organised workers one must be in their ranks, not outside. The
Macdonald crowd would be pushed aside by those inside the Labour Party, not by
those outside. While they (the S.P.) remained outside their organisation,
criticising and fault-finding, they antagonised the workers and had no
influence upon them.

By economic pressure, not by intelligence, the workers would
be forced to take control. The great trade unions were endeavouring to express
themselves upon society, and would change with the growing consciousness of the
workers. Thus the railway unions formed their great combination from inside; it
was not formed by any men outside. The economic pressure would force the
workers to realise the necessity for the Revolution, and the Socialists should
be inside, aiding this development and bringing to a realisation the Socialist
hopes and aspirations.

MR. FITZGERALD
denied that the Labour Party adopted the policy of delegation of function that
he had described. Their policy was one of delegation of power —and this made
ail the difference. If a position outside the Labour Party would antagonise the
workers, then opposition to the Liberals would antagonise a still larger number,
as the working-class following of the Liberal Party was much greater than that
of the Labour Party. And actually what his opponent was defending was
Socialists joining the Liberal Party, for as he (the speaker) had shown them in
his previous speeches, the Labour Party was but a portion of the Liberal Party.

Take the question of nomination continually insisted upon by
his opponent. The rank and file could, within certain limits, make nominations,
but they did not control them. As shown in mass in Jan. and Dec., 1910, as
shown in various bye elections, the Liberal party controlled them, and at their
instructions scores of nominations were swept aside. The support of the
Government, even against their own amendments, coupled with these facts, showed
that the liberal managers held the Labour Party in their grip, and dictated the
policy as well as selected the candidates to be put forward. Hence his
opponent's whole plea was for Socialists to join the Liberal Party.

The Socialist knew the majority of the workers were still
below the stage of mental development necessary for the revolution, but
experience showed that the most effective method was to fight all the enemies
of working class interests, i.e., Socialism, to add to the education, and so
shorten the time required for the establishment of Socialism.

Court hearings commenced against Aravindan
Balakrishnan, 75, known by others as “Comrade Bala”. Bala was a Maoist cult
leader based in Brixton and later Lambeth in South London charged with rape and
indecent assault. A police investigation into trafficking and slavery led to his
arrest and the rescue of three women from his residence in 2013, one of whom
was his daughter. The prosecution allege “The atmosphere within the collective
was controlled by Bala and his moods. Each woman lived a life of violence,
fear, isolation and confinement. “(His daughter) in particular was bullied,
beaten and separated from the world. She never went to school, played with a
friend, saw a doctor or a dentist. “She barely left the house. She was hidden
from the outside world, and it kept from her, except as a tool with which to
terrify her into subjugation. “Her freedom of movement was restrained to the
extent that even though she could have left physically, the power that (Bala)
exercised over her meant that she could never leave.”

The other two women rescued are believed to
have met him through the small political group he led called “Workers'
Institute of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought”. After a police raid in 1978
the then tiny group went underground and did not seem to appear in public.

Unfortunately just as people calling
non-socialists “Comrade” is not new, nor are cults calling themselves communist.
The “Workers Revolutionary Party” in the 1980s demonstrated such cults can
practice widespread long-lasting abuse by leaders even within a relatively
large membership. None of this is indictment of communism or what we call
socialism. Socialists in Britain operate openly not insularly, socialists
operate transparently not secretly, and socialists purporting to study Marxism
over thirty years would not omit study of the Marxist perspective of the family
in The Origin of the Family. There is no political justification for domestic
violence.

A UN panel of experts eventually acknowledged this January
the stench of Saudi Arabia’s war crimes, calling on the UN Security Council to
“investigate reports of violations of international humanitarian law and human
rights law in Yemen by all parties and to identify the perpetrators of such
violations.” The report reads: “The panel documented that the coalition
had conducted airstrikes targeting civilians and civilian objects, in violation
of international humanitarian law, including camps for internally displaced
persons and refugees; civilian gatherings, including weddings; civilian
vehicles, including buses; civilian residential areas; medical facilities;
schools; mosques; markets, factories and food storage warehouses; and other
essential civilian infrastructure, such as the airport in Sana’a, the port in
Hudaydah and domestic transit routes.”

Evidence from a UN report that suggests the Saudi-led
military campaign in Yemen has targeted innocent civilians may have been
falsified by Houthi rebels Minister for the Middle East Tobias Ellwood suggested
in the House of Commons. Addressing MPs in the House of Commons, Ellwood said
he took the UN report’s allegations seriously. However, the Tory minister noted
that its authors had not personally made their way to Yemen. He argued that the
evidence of potential attacks on civilians was predominantly based on “hearsay”
and satellite pictures.

“We are aware that the Houthis, who are very media-savvy in
such a situation, are using their own artillery pieces deliberately, targeting
individual areas where the people are not loyal to them, to give the impression
that there have been air attacks,” he said. Ellwood has vowed to sit down with
Saudi officials to ensure the UN report’s findings are carefully analyzed.

Andrew Smith of Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) said the
government must revoke all existing licenses for arms to Saudi Arabia. Elwood’s
position seems to be that we should just take Saudi Arabia’s word for it – this
is despite the fact it is one of the most violent and repressive regimes in the
world.” He continued “For decades now the UK has shared an almost entirely
uncritical relationship with the Saudi regime. One group that has benefited is
the arms companies, who have made millions from the bombardment. The UK may not
be bombing Yemen directly, but it has been complicit in the destruction. By
arming and supporting the Saudi regime it is aiding and fueling the destruction
that is taking place.”

Britain £1 billion worth of missiles, rockets sold over and
bombs to Saudi Arabia last summer despite evidence of war crimes committed by
the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. Britain’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia totaled
£2.95 billion (US$4.23 billion) for the first nine months of 2015, and roughly
£7 billion since Prime Minister David Cameron took office in 2010. Saudi Arabia
revealed earlier this month that British and American forces are stationed in
the control center from which military operations against Yemen are being
directed. However, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has refused to disclose how
many British personnel are involved.

Friday, January 29, 2016

Several states were moving to cut thousands of people from
their Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, or “food stamp”).

In New Jersey, for example, Governor Chris Christie pulled
the plug on benefits to 11,000 unemployed state residents. By this spring, an
estimated 500,000 people nationwide could be cut off. For most of them, the
maximum benefit of less than $200 a month is all the federal aid they get. For
some, it’s their entire income.

These people live in states that have chosen to reinstate
work requirements on able-bodied adults without children, which had been
suspended since the 2008 economic downturn. It means that single adults who
aren’t working at least 20 hours a week or participating in a job-training
program may only get three months of nutrition assistance in a three-year
period. After that, they’re on their own.

Joe Soss, a University of Minnesota professor who studies
the drive to “end welfare as we know it” that started in the 1990s under
President Bill Clinton, it’s the latest chapter in a misguided ideological
campaign. This drive is a consequence, he explained, of political rhetoric
suggesting that low-income people are poor because of their inability to
exercise self-discipline and make good choices. “It’s a modern update of
longstanding prejudices,” Soss said. These “get-tough policies are cast as
benefiting the poor in the long run,” he added, while their hardline supporters
claim to shield taxpayers from “criminal thugs, undocumented immigrants, and
those who live off the welfare system.”

Under Christie, New Jersey has sharply reduced the share of
federal block grant money it spends on direct cash assistance to needy
families, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. But as the
number of people getting help has fallen, the percentage of the state’s
residents living in poverty actually went up — from 9 percent to 11 percent —
between 2009 and 2012. Public servants worry that more stringent work rules for
food assistance are being imposed when there isn’t enough job and education
assistance for people who need it. “I don’t know where these work programs are.
And I know we are not ready for this,” Diane Riley of the Community FoodBank of
New Jersey pointed out. 40% of the food produced in the United States goes to
waste. There is not one good reason for anyone in the USA to ever go hungry.

In capitalism being poor is the highest crime. It is the
ultimate reflection of your failure. You didn't try hard enough, you didn't
work hard enough, and you didn't pray hard enough. The majority of us bought
into the corporate culture and we are all now doomed to labor for a few
generations under the yoke of the oligarchy. For the first time in US history,
life expectancy is headed downward.

More than half of the total population of Yemen, some 14.4
million people, are food insecure due to ongoing conflict and import
restrictions, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said.

Imports are essential as only four percent of the country's
land is arable and only a fraction of that is currently used for food
production. A shortage of critical inputs like seeds and fertilizers have
severely reduced crop production, with estimates suggesting the recent conflict
has caused dramatic losses to the agriculture sector. Crop production,
livestock rearing and fisheries employ 50 percent of Yemen's workforce and are
the main sources of livelihoods for two-thirds of the country. Yemen is among
the most water-scarce countries in the world with less than five percent of the
world average available per person per year, making irrigation a key concern
for farmers.

50% of the world’s population is crammed into just 1% of the
Earth’s landmass. Yet if you wished you could fit the entire world’s human
population into the state of Texas.

The world’s population is predicted by some to reach 11
billion by 2100. The map shows there is space for us all to live but it’ll take
some clever socialist thinking to ensure we actually do.

The map is based on NASA’s gridded population data, which
records the population of Earth in 14 square kilometre patches. This map uses a
grid of 28 million cells of roughly 3 x 3 miles. “The yellow region in the map
includes every cell with a population of 8,000 or more people. Since each of
them has an area of about nine square miles, the population density of each
yellow cell is at least 900 people per square mile, roughly the same population
density as the state of Massachusetts.

According to new estimates from the Local Government
Association (LGA), 66,000 council homes in England will be sold to tenants
under the Government’s Right to Buy scheme. Because local councils only receive
one third of the cash from Right to Buy purchases, they will not have the money
to replace the lost social housing, the LGA said. In fact, council finances are
in such a dire state that they will be forced to sell a further 22,000 council
properties – a forecast of 88,000 homes to be lost by end of decade. The number
of council houses has dropped from 5million in 1981 to 1.7million in 2014. More
and more people are being driven into the private rental centre, leading to a
£210m increase in the housing benefit bill.

The independent Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) also
voiced concern that measures in the new Housing and Planning Bill, which is
currently being debated by the House of Lords, would make it “very difficult”
for councils to build homes and warned that its own research indicated that
extending Right to Buy to housing associations could lead to the loss of an
additional 7,000 council homes a year which may not be replaced.

The Right to Buy scheme helps council and housing
association tenants in England buy their home with a discount of up to
£103,900, or £77,900 outside London. The policy hits council budgets for
house-building, which will also be affected by a proposed £2.2bn reduction in
social housing rents. The LGA is calling for 100 per cent of the receipts from
Right to Buy sale to go to councils. Currently, they only get one third, with
much of the remainder going to the Treasury.

The Government pledged to build 200,000 starter homes for
people entering the property market, but the LGA’s housing spokesman, said
ministers needed to recognise that “not everyone can afford to buy”. He said “With 68,000 people currently living in
temporary accommodation, annual homelessness spending of at least £330 million
and more than a million more on council waiting lists, it is clear that only an
increase of all types of housing – including those for affordable or social rent
– will solve our housing crisis. This loss of social rented housing risks
pushing more families into the private rented sector, driving up housing
benefit spending and rents and making it more difficult for families to save
the deposit needed for their first house.” Discounts offered to buyers of the
200,000 starter homes have a knock-on effect on the social housing sector, LGA
experts said, because it is funded by allowing developers off the hook on their
obligations to fund affordable housing. Research by Savills estate agents has
shown that the average first time buyer now requires a deposit more than double
their annual income to get onto the housing ladder.

Werner Schultink, chief of nutrition at UNICEF, said,
"Breastfeeding is a cornerstone of child survival, nutrition and
development. More investment is required to promote breastfeeding and to
encourage governments, health care professionals, workplaces, communities, and
families to create an environment that supports, protects, and encourages
it."

The Lancet finds that globally, the costs of not
breastfeeding amount to more than $300 billion each year, a figure comparable
to the entire global pharmaceutical market. About 820,000 child deaths could be
prevented annually (about 13 percent of all under-5 child deaths) by improving
breastfeeding rates, in addition to the lives already saved by current
breastfeeding practices. Nearly half of all diarrhea episodes and one-third of
all respiratory infections would be prevented with breastfeeding. For each of
the first two years a mother breastfeeds over her lifetime, she decreases her
risk of developing invasive breast cancer by six percent. She also benefits from
reduced ovarian cancer risk. Approximately 20,000 breast cancer deaths are
prevented each year by breastfeeding; improved rates could prevent another
20,000 deaths each year.

Dr. Cesar Victora, emeritus professor from the International
Center for Equity in Health, Post-Graduate Programme in Epidemiology, Federal
University of Pelotas in Brazil. "Breastfeeding is a powerful and unique
intervention that benefits mothers and children, yet breastfeeding rates are
not improving as we would like them to--and in some countries, are declining.”

Increasing breastfeeding rates to 90 percent in the U.S.,
China, and Brazil and to 45 percent in the U.K. would cut treatment costs of
common childhood illness and save at least US$2.45 billion in the U.S., US$29.5
million in the U.K., US$223.6 million in China, and US$6.0 million in Brazil.

Yet there exists aggressive marketing of breastmilk
substitutes (including infant formula) by their manufacturers and distributors which
undermines breastfeeding. Newly commissioned market research conducted by
Euromonitor International for the Series found that the breastmilk substitute
industry's reach and influence is growing--the retail value is expected to
reach US$70.6 billion by 2019. Such a figure far outpaces the dollars spent to
promote the benefits of breastfeeding worldwide.

According to Dr. Rollins, the success of the International
Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes, adopted at the 34th World Health
Assembly in 1981, depends upon countries enacting legislation, along with
rigorous monitoring and enforcement. "The multi-billion dollar breastmilk
substitute industry - and its marketing practices - undermines breastfeeding as
the best practice in early life."

Dr Alison McFadden, one of the authors and a senior
researcher specialising in inequalities in maternal and infant health at Dundee
University, said the UK along with other countries should end advertising of
formula for babies over six months old. She said: "The work we have done
is not about whether individual mothers or babies should or should not breastfeed,
it is their choice. We are saying there is no role for the blatant marketing of
breast milk substitutes or infant formula. If we compare what the government
spend on promoting breastfeeding with the value of the global sales of milk
formula then there is absolutely no comparison." Restricting the promotion
of alternatives to breast milk, she said, is one way to tackle barriers which
make it more difficult for mothers to breastfeed.

The article, also published in The Lancet,
says: "BMS companies circumvent the ban on advertising infant formula by
promoting follow-on milks that are not nutritionally necessary and for which
companies make exaggerated claims. "In some countries, including
Bangladesh, Brazil, and the UK, BMS companies were reported to seek to
influence health professionals through inappropriate sponsorship of health
conferences, promotion of their products (eg, by offering incentives to health
professionals who sell or promote their products), and forming links with
national health professional associations." They say urgent action is
needed to "ensure that the public, health professionals, and decision
makers do not continue to be exposed to the dominance of the promotion of
BMS."

Despite international recommendations that all children
should be exclusively breastfed from birth to six months of age, these rates
globally are only at 35.7 percent. The World Health Assembly's global target is
for countries to increase the rate of exclusive breastfeeding for the first six
months of life to at least 50 percent by 2025.

Recently, the city council of Randers approved with the
relative majority of votes from the Liberals and the Danish People’s Party a
decision that makes it mandatory for public institutions to serve pork.
Obviously, this was not prompted by the dietary concerns of the city of
Randers, a town in the Mid-Jutland peninsula with a population of about 60
thousand people. According to the
Randers city council, municipal institutions must provide - by law - that the
daily menu at childcare centers safeguards what is seen as a principle of
Danish food culture and tradition, by compulsory including pork on a daily
basis. The representatives of the Randers municipality hastened to explain that
their decision was not to force anybody to eat anything that ‘goes against
one’s belief or religion’, oh, no, but rather only a necessary motion to
safeguard the cultural heritage of Danish gastronomic cuisine. Danish roasted
pork with parsley sauce has been nominated as Denmark’s official national dish
and was decided in a voting scheme where only 1.15% of Danes participated, and
only 40% of them voted for the pork dish.

The harsher exclusionary migration laws, the worsening of
asylum conditions, the tightening of citizenship rules, the curtailing of
welfare provisions and help to refugees, the implementation of border controls,
are all part of the competition to be the hardest-hitting and toughest on immigration
issues. Migration and asylum politics have thus been taken hostage in the
politics of vote-catching between the Liberals and the Danish People’s Party.

Some unrepentant Maoists would have us believe that despite of
the glaring obvious, the Chinese model, although not perfect is, nevertheless,
progressive and perhaps even a still a step towards socialism.

China’s widening wealth gap is one of the country’s fastest
growing social concerns, according to the recently released 2015 China
Livelihood Development Report. At the center of this year’s report is an
investigation into the growing national income distribution gap. More than a
third of China’s property and wealth is concentrated in the hands of the
country’s top 1 percent; the bottom 25 percent of all families control only 1
percent of China’s wealth.

During the past three decades, China’s income Gini index
soared from around 0.3 in the 1980s to 0.45 now – well above the warning level
of 0.4.

Unchangeable factors such as hukou and one’s parents’
educational background dramatically affect children’s education opportunities.
The public healthcare system, which should play a leading a role in shrinking
the differences cause by the income gap, has been turned upside down to apply
intense financial pressure to vulnerable families.

“No matter whether we look at social structure, class or a
trans-regional picture, all evidence shows that inequality is growing,” said LiJianxin, the report’s director and a professor at Peking University.

Thursday, January 28, 2016

Election frenzy possesses the USA every four years because
they have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining
the nation’s destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to
go to the polls and choose one of the two leaders who have already been chosen
for us.

We should not be surprised that populist ideas are making a
comeback. Many believe Bernie Sanders role in the nomination contest is to sheep-dog
the disenchanted back into the Democratic Party fold. He will shepherd his
supporters towards Hillary Clinton’s after she defeats him with her massively
superior financial resources and corporate media approval. He will help legitimize
the plutocratic “two party system” – in which the Republicans and Democrats
function as “two wings of the same bird of prey.” Democratic Party activists will
try to sell their Wall Street-protecting nominee as the candidate for the 99
percent and Sanders will fuel this deadly illusion of the lesser evil. Those
genuine radicals will sadly experience a deepened sense of powerlessness that
will be engendered when Sanders is defeated, as he almost certainly will be.
The best thing and the worse thing that can be said of Sanders is that he meant
well.

As Howard Zinn said, “the really critical thing isn’t who is
sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in-– in the streets, in the
cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting,
who is occupying offices and demonstrating – those are the things that
determine what happens.”

Before and after those two minutes in a voting booth,
casting our ballots, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating,
agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the
neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly,
patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain
critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House. This election, like
others before, will suck up political energy that would be better expended
elsewhere; and, as usual, little, if any, good will come from of it. In order
to vote for Bernie as a presidential candidate, you have to join the Democratic
Party. But even that is not the real issue. The issue is many people will
volunteer for the Sanders campaign and dump thousands of hours of activist time
into the dead-end of the Democratic Party. Those activists could be doing
grass-roots movement work. Bernie's candidacy for the Democrats will not help
the movement, it will deliver those people to the Democrats. Mainly what
Bernie's campaign will do is to re-legitimize a Party that has lost all
legitimacy. Dumping the Democrats would prove his belief in principal over
party. To support Hillary, if she defeats him in the primaries, makes Sanders a
paper tiger.

There are very much two Bernie Sanders. One persona most
definitely can come across as sincere about concern for the poor and
disadvantaged, but make no mistake, his other side is a militarist who isn’t
about to challenge U.S. supremacy. The “military industrial complex” is
something Sanders likes to denounce yet he embraced the building of a wasteful
F-35 fighter jet base in his home state.

He supported the war in Kosovo against Serbia, the invasion
of Afghanistan, funding for the endless Iraq disaster as well as the losing and
misguided War on Terror. He voted in favor of Clinton’s 1996 Anti-Terrorism and
Effective Death Penalty Act, which expanded the federal death penalty and acted
as the precursor to the Patriot Act.

As for Israel, Bernie Sanders has been would never halt the
$3 billion the U.S. government sends to the country every year. Last summer he
backed Israel’s murderous bombing of Gaza. He’s even questioned Palestine’s
right to resist. Several former members of Sander’s staff have also been
employed by AIPAC, including Israel apologists David Sirota and Joel Barkin.
Want to change in the U.S. policy in the Middle East? Bernie isn’t your man.
Sanders doesn’t oppose U.S. power, nor does his campaign do a single thing to
build independent politics in the country, perhaps the last chance to salvage
any democracy we may have left. In the end, Bernie Sanders will play the
lesser-evil card and plea for us all to hold our noses and vote for Hillary
Clinton, who guarantees a future of more war and economic inequality.

“The Vermont senator has given out more than $200,000
through his two PACs, Friends of Bernie and Progressive Voters of America. The
PVA, in turn, has donated tens of thousands of dollars to embattled red-state
Democrats like Mark Begich of Alaska, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, and Mary
Landrieu of Louisiana”

Mark Begich promotes expanded oil and natural gas drilling
on federal lands, starting with opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to
energy exploration. Begich voted multiple times against ending or reducing
federal tax subsidies to oil and gas companies, helping to convince Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid to drop such a move from the Nevadan’s budget
proposal, and in voting for development of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada
to Texas.

Kay Hagan as a North Carolina senator is just as protective
of her state’s capitalist interests as. In her case, it is the tobacco lobby.
When the European Union mandated that cigarette packages labeling consists of
at least 75 percent warnings that the contents were carcinogenic, she and other
politicians warned the European Union warning of dire consequences should the
Union adopt the regulations on cigarette packaging it was proposing. The
Senators said the proposed regulations would violate international trade rules
and adversely affect trade relations with the United States.

Mary Landrieu from Louisiana is a politician in thrall to
the power of oil companies. Senator Mary Landrieu calls on government to lift
EPA ban on BP. The ban imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency to
prevent BP from securing sensitive federal contracts even as the state sues the oil firm for the
environmental damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon disaster. His voting
record? When GW Bush was president Landrieu voted 74% in line with Bush
supporting tax cuts eleven times and also cuts to the Death Estate tax.

What Bernie Sanders means by “socialism” is something more
like capitalism with a human face. But this is not what socialism is about. The
Scandinavian model have indeed managed to achieve social welfare objectives,
but has never involved fundamental alterations of capitalism’s underlying
property relations. Neither would Sanders. Scandinavian reformists thought the
benign hand of the state would replace the merciless invisible hand of the
market but today the reformers have their hands full trying to retain what they
can from the gains of the past.

That’s why socialists won’t be jumping on his band-wagon
anytime soon. Nevertheless, it has been a terribly long time that an aspirant
for the presidency of the United States is talking about “socialism”, no matter
how vague his meaning of it is. If Sanders succeeds in getting the idea of
socialism back in peoples’ minds, he might even be sowing the seeds of thought
that will someday take hold in a more constructive way and that would be very
welcomed. The best thing about Bernie Sanders is that he talks about
“socialism” even if he really means something else by the word.

There can be no escape nor substantial relief for people
from the economic and political domination of the greedy vested interests of
which they are now the victims, except through the working people, organized as
a powerful political force challenging the oligarchy now in control. Without
such a party all political achievement of the workers is inadequate and
ineffective, and true social progress utterly impossible. The Socialist Party
is ready and willing to merge its political functions in a genuine independent
political party of socialist workers and will certainly continue to put forth
its best efforts to that end. For the time being, we raise high our unsullied
banner, and with principles inviolate and ideals undimmed, we stand as the
Socialist Party, appealing to the producing class to join us in building up the
party of their class — the party standing staunchly and uncompromisingly for
their aspirations. Nothing frightens the ruling class more than the prospect of
a truly independent revolutionary working-class movement.

“Conservative or
Bourgeois Socialism:

“A part of the
bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the
continued existence of bourgeois society. To this section belong economists,
philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working
class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of
cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every
imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into
complete systems. The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern
social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting
therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary
and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.
The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the
best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various
more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a
system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but
requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of
existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the
bourgeoisie.” - Communist Manifesto

Sounds like good ol’ Bernie to us.

It was a real independent
workers movement that Marx was trying to assist by helping it to clarify its
goals. He wasn’t trying to get reformers elected to be the head of state.

Let us go back a little into history and we see that the
origins of the Scandinavian welfare state model was in Otto Bismarck’s Prussia
- a Sickness Insurance Act, an Accident
Insurance Law followed, Old Age and Disability legislation and then came a code
of factory legislation, with a system of labour exchanges to promote
employment. Many of these measures were the first of their kind in the world.
Along with the nationalization of the railways this began to look like
socialism to many people. Shrewdly Bismarck understood the stick had to be
supplemented by the carrot. It was intended to ensure internal unity and class
peace while the state intensified an aggressive foreign policy of colonialism
and foreign-market penetration, thereby compensating the wealthy for its
social-welfare expenses. This policy was also going to drive a wedge between
the right wing and left wing of the Social-Democratic Party.

There is a shared premise in the debates regarding Bernie
Sanders’ presidential and they tend to assume that Sanders would be able to
meaningfully advance his politics if he were to become president. That is, they
presuppose the State is neutral and malleable and can be shaped and reshaped by
those who govern it. History illustrates a very different story, one in which
the political party and personal inclinations of presidents (let alone
candidates) are generally irrelevant to how they wield power. Presidents and
Prime Ministers have historically advanced the objective interests of the
nation-state, prioritizing its international power and the profitability of its
economy above all other considerations. It is irrelevant whether Sanders is sincere
or a phony, if elected president, he will in fact be sworn to do so. Selecting
who will rule without any ability to control the content of that rule, the
voter casts the ballot as an act of faith. Investing political and emotional
energy into nothing more than the good name of the system (election nights are
always exercises in flag-waving celebration of a system that lets us choose our
rulers), voters incorrectly argue that voting is better than doing nothing and
condemn those who abstain. Yet, the disillusioned are not to blame for forces
that they have no control over. And if the disillusioned do become interested in
challenging the abuses of everyday life, it will not be through voting but
through criticizing the system that voting acclaims. The opposite of hope is
not despair. It is power. Everyone gets all emotionally attached to some single
"savior" that going to fix the rotten system. There will be no
saviors, only WE in massive numbers can affect any real change in the
status-quo. Resistance in all forms brings about change. Real and enduring
change is hard work.

Using the words of Eugene Debs, "If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist
wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the
promised land if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you
out."

Neither Sanders nor any other politician can lead us to the
alternative new society we fight for. We must build it for ourselves.

He talks the ‘socialist’ talk, but he has reliably aided and
abetted the Pentagon and the militarists in their theft of resources. Resources
that were and continue to be stolen from the poor. If Sanders is a socialist,
it is only in a very Orwellian sense. More likely, he is another Trojan Horse, mouthing
liberal platitudes, but in the end betraying working people.

The “independent” Sanders has enjoyed a special agreement
with the Democratic leadership in the U.S. Senate. He votes with the Democrats
on all procedural matters in exchange for the committee seats and seniority
that would be available to him as a Democrat. (He can break this rule in some
exceptional cases if Democratic Senate Whip Dick Durbin agrees, but the request
is rarely made.) Sanders is free to vote as he wishes on policy matters, but he
has almost always voted with the Democrats on such matters.

Consistent with this party loyalty, Sanders refuses to
seriously or substantively criticize his “good friend” and Democratic
presidential primary “rival” Mrs. Clinton – a militantly corporatist and
militarist right-wing Democrat. Sanders has backed Obama’s numerous murderous
military actions around the world, from Libya, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan,
Yemen, and Iraq to China, Ukraine, and Russia. During the 1990s, the not-so
“independent” Congressman Sanders voted for and/or otherwise supported:

* Economic sanctions that killed more than a million Iraqi
civilians

* Every U.S. bombing of Iraq from 1992 on

* The sending of U.S. military units to Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia to threaten Iraq because “we cannot tolerate aggression”

Sanders has said repeatedly that he will not be a third-
party “spoiler” in the general election and thus will direct his primary
delegates and voters to line up behind Hillary.Inc. in 2016. In his
presidential campaign speeches, Sanders has been unwilling to mention the
corporatized Democratic Party as part of the nation’s oligarchy problem.

Europe is on a dangerous, slippery slope of increasing
xenophobia and racism. There has been some disgraceful treatment of refugees and a growing fear about refugees around Europe. Some of this anxiety relates to culture,
some to crime, some to terrorism, but much is economic in nature. Whether officially or unofficially, Europe is becoming more and more racist, turning into a xenophobic fortress. Europe’s refugee “crisis” is turning into an irrational,
xenophobic panic that is not justified by facts. It is misleading people into
dangerous political territory of persecution and racist discrimination that infringe on all our rights as citizens.

One prevalent idea is that Europe is bearing the brunt of
the human fallout from the conflicts of the Middle East. There has certainly
been a pronounced pick-up in asylum applications in the European Union: 995,000
in 2015 alone, double the previous year. Yet that still needs to be put in a
global perspective. Of the 14 million cross-border refugees worldwide just one
million are in Europe. There are two million Syrian refugees in Turkey alone.
Jordan is also home to two million displaced people, equivalent to around a
third of the native population.

Europe’s intake of one million refugees last year amounts to
0.2 per cent of its total 500 million population. Denmark’s intake of 21,300
asylum-seekers last year constitutes less than 0.4 per cent of its national
population.

Another perception is that refugees are all indigents who
can’t work or contribute economically. But the experience of Nordic countries
in recent decades suggests the labour market participation rates of refugees
show the greatest increase over time of all migrant groups. While on arrival
only around 15 per cent of refugees in Sweden worked that ratio ultimately rose
to more than 60 per cent. It’s worth remembering that skills flee along with
people. In Germany a fifth of Syrian refugees in 2013-14 had been through
higher education, roughly the same ratio as native Germans. This may be because
often only wealthier and more educated individuals can afford the passage to
Europe. Another fear centres around how European countries with already
painfully high jobless rates, such as Spain and Greece, can possibly cope if
there is a new influx into the labour market. Yet most asylum-seekers have tended
to choose to claim asylum in countries with high employment rates such as
Germany and Sweden.

The International Monetary Fund recently estimated that
there will actually be a modest short-term GDP boost due to the higher
government spending on feeding and sheltering refugees. The IMF also suggests
refugees can, in the longer term, help alleviate Europe’s demographic crisis,
helping relieve the pressure on national pension systems. Many fear that a flow
of refugees will have a negative impact on natives’ living standards. But
evidence from Turkey suggests its sizeable influx of Syrian refugees into the
informal local labour market has actually boosted the average wages of native
workers in the formal economy. The net impact on the public finances of higher
refugee flows could be offset by allowing asylum-seekers to work while awaiting
their claims to be processed. The UK has considerably more onerous restrictions
in this regard than Germany and Sweden.

In the end, the case for generosity to refugees should be
based on humanitarian, rather than economic, arguments and there is a danger of
over-claiming over the material benefits from an open door policy. There is a
short-term boost to Europe’s GDP under the IMF’s latest forecasts, but GDP per
capita is still seen as falling slightly. And much of long-term fiscal impact
will depend on the extent of refugees’ participation in the labour market and
the skills mix of refugees. Yet it is still useful to dowse the economic
alarmism.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has criticized Europe’s response to
ongoing refugee crisis gripping the continent, saying the European governments’
reaction to the problem has resulted in a crackdown on basic freedoms. HRW
director, Kenneth Roth, made the remarks in his introductory essay to the rights group's annual report.

"Fears of terror attacks and of the potential impact of
refugee influx led to a visible scaling back of rights in Europe and other
regions," Roth said. "Blatant Islamophobia and
shameless demonizing of refugees have become the currency of an increasingly assertive
politics of intolerance.” The right response to the inflow of refugees is not
more repressive border and immigration enforcement, but a better controlled
program for the resettlement of asylum seekers, according to the report. "The
effect of European policy so far has been to leave refugees with little choice
but to risk their lives at sea for a chance at asylum," Roth said. The official further warned that “a polarizing us-versus-them rhetoric” adopted by Europe and the United States has moved from 'the political fringe to the mainstream.'

Cameron is not interested in the humanity of refugees –
lumping them, their stories and their suffering into a “bunch of migrants” for mere
fodder for his jokes at Prime Minister's Question Time which can be added to his
expression “swarm of people” in his
other earlier attempt to dehumanise desperate men, women and children. We see the
results of all this, a rise in hate crimes on British railways – up 37% in five
years. This confirms a trend seen last year, when there was a 43% increase in
religious hate crime, and a 15% rise in race hate over the previous 12 months.

We should be addressing the root cause of the problem, not reacting to the symptoms. We should be shaming the villains, not blaming the victims, and the culprit is capitalism with its armed conflicts and its trade wars.

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Flint once boasted 80,000 General Motors employees, but now
only has a tenth of that. Unemployment is rampant. The racial composition of Flint is 56.6% African American. The US Census Bureau reported that Flint is the
second most impoverished city for its size. Just over 40 percent of the
municipality’s residents are living at or below the poverty line. Those in
power find it easy to ignore the cries of poor people—especially if those poor
people happen to be largely black. The people of Flint has consistently voted Democrat. In 2006,
the Bay Area Center for Voting Research ranked Flint as the 10th most liberal
city in the United States. Put bluntly, since the voters in Flint, Michigan,
are a lost cause and of no use to the Republican Governor Rick Snyder and his
Republican Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, and Attorney General who
all had little incentive to respond to the complaints. As the citizens of the city lost hair and developed rashes,
as children drank water that was tainted with lead and E. Coli those with the power to help did nothing. Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ)
officials urged those people concerned about lead in Flint’s drinking water to
“relax,” that there was no “broad problem” with contamination and described the
whistleblower EPA official, Miguel Del Toral, whose draft report initially
alerted lead-poisoned Flint residents to their great danger, as a “rogue
employee.” They also attacked the work of Virginia Tech safe drinking water
expert Marc Edwards. The analysis by Edwards and his team of graduate students
revealed that some Flint tap water measured nearly 2.5 times more lead
contamination than EPA’s hazardous waste designation level. They cast doubts
upon Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, director of the pediatric residency program at
Flint’s Hurley Hospital whose research showed that after the switch to
untreated Flint River drinking water, blood lead levels in children doubled, or
even tripled.

Two years ago, the people of Flint turned on their faucets
and a brown horror came flowing out. Many people complained to the state's
government but were roundly ignored and dismissed. The people of Flint and
other surrounding towns have been drinking, cooking with and bathing in
lead-contaminated water for two years. In order to "save money," Governor Snyder's hand-picked emergency
manager decided to change Flint's water source from Lake Huron to the Flint
River. General Motors used the river as its personal dumping ground for
decades; it is highly polluted, and more importantly is highly acidic. When
Flint River water began flowing through Michigan's ancient water supply system,
it absorbed the lead right off the pipes and delivered it to thousands of
homes.

Lead contamination in water cannot be smelled, tasted, or
seen. Flint’s water did have other problems besides lead contamination,
including discoloration, foul odor and taste, but these were due to other
harmful biological and chemical contaminants than lead.

What does lead do to the human body? Infants and small
children can suffer brain and nervous system damage, weakened immune systems
and general physical collapse that can lead to death. Pregnant women have a
higher risk of stillbirth or miscarriage. A raft of studies has pretty much
concluded that lead can cause cancer. It causes cardiovascular diseases and
kidney damage which, like cancer, can also kill. Five parts per billion of lead
are a concern. 5,000 parts per billion is considered "toxic waste."
From April 2014 until October 2015 the people of Flint were drinking water with
up to 13,000 parts per billion of lead in it.

Flint residents are still getting billed for water the
Virginia Tech study described as toxic waste.. In France long ago, it was
"Let them eat cake." Today, in Flint, it's "Let them drink
bottled water" ... except a whole lot of people in Flint can't afford
bottled water, and they sure can't bathe in it.

"Everybody knows," wrote Flint native, author and
film-maker, Michael Moore, "that this would not have happened in
predominantly white Michigan cities like West Bloomfield, or Grosse Pointe, or
Ann Arbor. Everybody knows that if there had been two years of taxpayer
complaints, and then a year of warnings from scientists and doctors, this would
have been fixed in those towns." Moore described what is happening in
Flint as a "racial crime." It was a crime against humanity done by a negligent
administration which shows utter contempt for the welfare of the people whose
welfare it is supposed to ensure. To them, certain people can just be ignored,
pushed around and bullied.

It often takes a disaster to draw attention to environmental
injustice. The crisis in Flint is terrifying - residents were left to drink
poisoned water for months despite warnings from researchers who found elevated
levels of lead in children - but presidential candidates and the dominant media
did little to acknowledge that the pattern of pollution in communities of color
extends far beyond Michigan. Nationally, people of color are nearly twice as
likely as white people to live within one mile of facilities that use and store
chemicals so dangerous that facility operators must submit risk management
plants to the government. Children of color make up nearly two-thirds of the
5.7 million children living near these high-risk facilities, and poor people of
color are significantly more likely to live near massive stockpiles of
dangerous chemicals than white people living above the poverty line. In the
event of a toxic release, spill or explosion, communities of color would face
the brunt of the impact, according to a recent report by the Center for
Effective Government.

Researchers at the University of Michigan published twin
studies in January showing that low-income people and people of color don't end
up living near hazardous waste sites and other polluters because housing is
cheap. Instead, their communities are disproportionately targeted by industries
that follow "the path of least resistance" when deciding where to
build facilities. Hillary Clinton alluded to these disparities at the close of
the January 17 Democratic debate, declaring that "if kids in a rich
Detroit suburb" were drinking contaminated water, authorities in Michigan
would have acted quickly to stop the problem. Bernie Sanders was not to be
outdone - he demanded Snyder resign, saying that thousands of children may now
suffer brain damage from lead because the governor knew about the problem and
did nothing for months to fix it. Seeking media attention around the mass
poisoning of children resulting from the ineptitude of government officials, if
not their outright racism, is easy. But would either of these candidates really
fight for environmental justice as president?

Flint’s catastrophe serves as a stark reminder that safe,
clean drinking water is the essence of life.